UC Berkeley’s “Hyper-Aggressive Pogo-Stick” Robot Now Works Outdoors

UC Berkeley’s Salto has been one of our favorite robots since 2016, which makes it old-ish in robot years. While it’s kept the same “hyper-aggressive pogo-stick” concept, a series of upgrades has endowed Salto with with the ability to do increasingly more dynamic maneuvers.

The original Salto could make two jumps in a row. Thrusters added in 2017 gave the robot the control it needed to chain together multiple jumps. And late last year at IROS, an improved controller gave Salto the intelligence that it needed to make pinpoint jumps that allowed it traverse a series of vertical obstacles (and more).

The big constraint has always been that in order for Salto to keep itself upright and in one piece, it had to jump within a motion-capture environment, which limited its usefulness to (let’s be honest) not much more than a cool research project and highly effective YouTube video view generator.

Today at ICRA, UC Berkeley roboticists Justin Yim and Eric Wang (from Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab) presented the latest version of Salto, which adds the sensing and computing required to do away with the motion-capture system completely. Salto can now jump as much as you want out of the lab, and in fact completely outdoors.